List of historical earthquakes

Historical earthquakes is a list of significant earthquakes known to have occurred prior to the early 20th century. As the events listed here occurred before routine instrumental recordings &mdash; later followed by seismotomography imaging technique and detections using space satellites from outer space &mdash; they rely mainly on the analysis of written sources, observations of shaking objects and/or animal behavior during earthquakes, religious/traditional beliefs about earthquakes such as "God's punishment" or "God's rage". There is often significant uncertainty in location and magnitude and sometimes date for each earthquake. The number of fatalities is also often highly uncertain and hypothetical, particularly for the older events.

19th century
Source for all events with 'USGS' labelled as the source United States Geological Survey (USGS) ''Note: Magnitudes are generally estimations from intensity data. When no magnitude was available, the maximum intensity, written as a Roman numeral from I to XII, is given.''